Sex, Not in the City, circa 1790s

Anyone who still doubts that sexuality has a history need only look in on the Boomers watching an episode of Lena Dunham’s “Girls.” That would be me and my husband in the television’s lurid glow, trading looks of incomprehension, even incredulity, as those “Girls” and their guys cavort. It’s a come-down, because back in the day (early Seventies), we thought ourselves so free, sleeping with our steadies (missionary position mostly) or catting around (members of the opposite sex only). And now, the antics of Lena and the gang leave us looking . . . well, uncomfortably like my mother did when I (then forty-ish) brightly suggested that she and my father (late sixties), missing the action since his bypass surgery, should try oral sex. But if the last half-century marks a transformative epoch in sexual desire, behavior, and expression in the United States and beyond, many historians have come to believe that there was a much earlier era of sea change.

A broad consensus has emerged that the Enlightenment propelled fundamental changes in the practice and understanding of sexuality, and some scholars posit a veritable sexual revolution on both sides of the Atlantic during the eighteenth century. Younger people embraced more permissive attitudes toward premarital sex, same-sex romantic friendships blossomed, and marriages based on affection came to govern expectations among the middle class. The double standard flourished, too, as the burden for preserving chastity fell harder on women than men. Whereas men were reputed lustful, even predatory by nature, the former daughters of Eve shouldered new cultural expectations as the morally superior sex. Philadelphia, the 1790s capital of what Cole Porter labelled “Any Thing Goes,” hosted what Clare Lyons calls “a vibrant pleasure culture,” one that tolerated pregnancy out of wedlock, prostitution, and all sorts of smutty print. Even in the eastern parts of New England, that hearth of Puritanism, the decriminalizing of most sexual conduct proceeded apace over the eighteenth century. Small wonder, then, that so many historians of early America have explored so essential an aspect of human behavior during such a pivotal period in the past.¹

Among the most recent are the distinguished scholars Doron S. Ben-Atar and Richard D. Brown, teamed up through the good offices of John M. Murrin, to collaborate on a book about two seemingly mysterious criminal prosecutions that unfolded in New England’s hill-country towns during the late 1790s. First charged was John Farrell, an Irish-born bachelor physician who, in the previous dozen years, had passed through half a dozen rural Massachusetts and New York communities and earned a reputation for curing cancers. But shortly after he drifted into Hampshire County’s hardscrabble Leverett, about 100 miles west of Boston, Farrell landed in prison, accused by some of his new neighbors of having sex with a dog. A few years later and some seventy miles to the southwest, another elderly man met a like fate. Despite his origins in a respectable yeoman clan in Derby, Connecticut, townspeople there came to regard young Gideon Washburn as a sketchy character when he narrowly escaped punishment for counterfeiting. The apple did not roll far from the parental tree: decades later his son William also fell into disrepute among his neighbors on the outskirts of Litchfield after a dispute about a farm led to a lawsuit that dragged through the courts for years. In the end, a legal technicality won William title to the land, but two months later, some of those same neighbors who were involved in the suit set the law on Gideon, now living in his son’s household, for repeated (and evidently none-too-furtive) violations of the local livestock.

The two cases were unusual in every way, as Ben-Atar and Brown muster impressive learning to demonstrate. If sexuality in general has a history, bestiality has not changed much over the millennia. All cultures have treated it as taboo, and...